Regret Is a Terrible Thing
by Holz090
Summary: Awful title, couldn't think of anything better. Just a little one-shot, basically Gene's musing over the events 2.8. Contains one very slight spoiler.


Gene downed his drink and signalled the barman for the same again. Looking around the dingy bar with its shabby, graffiti covered stools and a tramp in each corner, he sighed with discontented acceptance. This wasn't Luigis, and those drunken men slumped over the bar were certainly not his loyal team, but given his recent actions this was probably more than he deserved.

After all, shooting your colleague is the biggest taboo in the book, surely? Just weeks before he'd floored a building site owner, branding him a cop killer, and now here he was, having done just the same; Except he was worse. Alex Drake wasn't just some rookie PC, she was the highest ranking officer in the entire station, a DI, and a bloody good one too. She was also, as much as he hated to admit it, his closest friend, and the closest he had to a love life. She was the posh, mouthy tart he'd grown terrifyingly close to, the only person with whom he felt truly content. She was his reliable, funny, beautiful Bols, and now she was on life support. Because of him.

Granted it had been an accident, and in fact he'd been trying to defend her, ironically to stop her getting shot. But who would believe him after one of the last things he'd said to her was that he'd kill her? Not that anything else mattered, so long as Alex lived. She could hate him all she wanted, and he was sure that would be plenty, just as long as she was ok. Just as long as he could see her stride through the doors to his kingdom once more, he'd happily let her slit his throat on the way out. As he downed another lonely scotch, Gene made a pact with himself: If she dies, so do I.

It sounded awful and quite frankly cringeworthy, even in his own head. The old Gene would be beating the living daylights out of this soft southern Nancy that was currently sitting in the shadow of the Manc lion himself, but the truth remained. She'd changed him, and Gene knew that there was no way he could ever go back. She was like a tumour – what had started out as a small annoyance had spread right through him, seemingly without him even noticing until it was too late. Now there was no way she could be removed – the operation would kill him.

Operation. Operation rose. The very words now haunted him. She'd gone on and on about this, driving him insane with this desperate sense of urgency, muttering something about stopping an infection. Then came the big one, a revelation which had had taken by complete surprise, and turned his neatly arranged world upside down. "I'm from the future", she said, "Just like Sam".

How had he missed this? He'd thought to himself. How could I not notice just how insane this woman really is? How could someone he'd placed so much trust in possibly treat him like this, throwing months of friendship back in his face? The only possibility was that she was delusional, just the fruitcake he'd so often joked about. No wonder she never found it funny.

Sympathy had initially saved her from the men in white coats, but when she tried to take over such a vital operation as the gold bullion job, she had to be stopped. He'd thrown her out, threatened to kill her. Not his greatest moment, but he'd been so blind with anger and betrayal... And now she was at death's door. If it wasn't so serious, he probably would have laughed at the sheer irony of it.

But she'd been right about the blaggers, right about their route... what was to say she wasn't telling the truth about this, too? Bols certainly didn't seem the time to abandon a child, so who or where was this Molly she kept talking about? Perhaps she was dead, and her poor mother had been driven insane with grief, concocting these elaborate stories to convince herself it wasn't true. Maybe her father had kidnapped her, and that was why Alex had become a cop, to find her daughter. Or maybe she'd been telling the truth and her daughter was 30 years in the future, waiting for her mother to be done playing cops and robbers with the Gene Genie and snap out of her coma. Poor girl must be terrified...

As was he right at that moment, and not just for his mental health for even considering this ridiculous notion to be true. He was on the run for a crime he didn't technically commit, knowing full well he couldn't hide forever. Gene Hunt does not run away, he mused. At least, not the Gene Hunt he'd known for the past 40-odd years.

He slammed his glass on the bar with such force it almost shattered: Suddenly it was clear what he had to do. They could lock him up if they wanted, send in the lynch mob. They couldn't make him hurt anymore than he already did. He'd lose his whole career, the career he'd spend his whole life working at, sacrificed everything for... and yet now none of that seemed to matter.

No, it was time to stop running. He had to see her, tonight.


End file.
